Claudia Tanner believes there is a very high chance of blackouts in parts of the European Union in the near future.
In Austria, the government is intensively preparing for a possible power outage. Defense Minister Claudia Tanner explained what measures she expects regarding the army and the population, as well as what specific threats she expects from the head of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin.
This was said in an interview with Die Welt.
“For Putin, hacker attacks on Western energy sources are a means of hybrid warfare. We should not pretend that this is only a theory. We need to prepare for blackouts in Austria and other European countries. The question is not whether a blackout will come, but whether when it comes,” she said.
According to the minister, Austria has already begun to systematically inform people about possible blackouts: the police, firefighters, civil defense associations and soldiers regularly conduct joint exercises, sometimes with the participation of municipalities and schools.
“We distribute small brochures in which we give advice on what to do in case of a blackout and how to take precautionary measures in time, for example, how to store certain products,” added the Minister of Defense.
According to her, by 2025 Austria will invest a total of 180 million euros in the creation of so-called “safety islands”, which will have enough energy and be able to work autonomously for at least two weeks.
She added that the war in Ukraine has become a war of attrition, with great intensity and heavy losses on both sides.
But, in her opinion, it is important that the West continues to support Ukraine with all its might, respects the sanctions and remains the only .
“Without the support of the West, Ukraine would have lost. As a neutral country, we do not provide lethal weapons, but we provide field X-ray machines, helmets and heat generators, which is no less important,” Claudia Tanner added.
She also believes It is important that in high diplomatic circles the ways of ending the war are being discussed more and more intensively, and the emphasis is increasingly being placed on diplomacy.
There is an opinion among the EU states that Ukraine, as a sovereign state, should decide when to negotiate and what is the purpose of these negotiations.
But there is another opinion – that the West, which has been supporting Ukraine with weapons and billions of dollars for months, should work with Kyiv to figure out when the end of this war will be reached, and when it makes sense to start negotiations in the appropriate format.
According to the head of the Ministry of Defense, high energy prices, which are the result of Putin’s brutal war of aggression against Ukraine, can increasingly be perceived by people in the West as a burden.
Let's add that in France they emphasized that only the Ukrainian people should “decide when and how to start negotiations”.
Meanwhile, Russia is through Western media trying to push a narrative about peace talks and “diplomacy”. However, according to the plan of the Russian Federation, such negotiations should be on the terms of the aggressor country, the CPI says.
And in the United States, they believe that the Kremlin is not ready for serious negotiations to end the war.
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